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Google could be protected from UK copyright liability

By Oliver Luft

Search engines, such as Google, could become exempt from possible copyright infringement under amendments tabled to the Digital Economy Bill by Conservative peer Lord Lucas.

Lord Lucas has proposed a specific change to the bill saying publishers of websites, including those owned and run by newspaper companies, should be presumed to give open access to search engines – unless they otherwise implement technology to block those sites indexing for listings.

His amendment, called Protection of search engines from liability for copyright infringement, states: “Every provider of a publicly accessible website shall be presumed to give a standing and non-exclusive license to providers of search engine services to make a copy of some or all of the content of that website, for the purpose only of providing said search engine services …

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